Summer 2024 Nabuurs&VanDoorn, charged with tracking down the Missing Garden, are on the road to intervene at the Ecocathedral in Mildam. The garden, which has disappeared from the Technical University campus in Eindhoven since 1983, could now have looked just like the cathedral.
Between forest and village (more forest than village) stands somewhat hidden Louis Le Roy's Eco-Cathedral. An architecture of stacked rubble among stumps and thistles. Flapping strands of light are given texture by swarms of tiny leeches that burst as the artists emerge from the shadows.
Their online queries in search of the Missing Garden they have reduced to single words by painting over printed emails. On the spot, the words take on meaning and create a perspective unseen without the artists' interventions. They see it as the job of artists and poets to give meaning to nature. Louis Le Roy wanted to give local fauna and flora a voice by making this monumental stage out of disposable trash.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn want viewers of their work to reconsider the past and see possible future scenarios. They enter into dialogue with what they consider to be their predecessors. Louis Le Roy is no longer among us, but his materialized legacy gives the artists an opportunity to intervene and provoke metaphysical feedback. It is important to be in touch with a past we can relate to and recalibrate our senses in an effort to identify ourselves with the culture that made all of this possible.
Would it still be possible today?
How to see value?
Why is the Le Roy Garden missing in Eindhoven?
Supported by: Cultuur Eindhoven
In 2018 the Verbeeke foundation started the proces of building a new ecokathedraal on their private art & nature site in Kemzeke, Belgium. Besides local building materials they also used rubble from a house in Aleppo that was shot to pieces.